Futurama has nearly finished the first season of its Hulu revival, but it’s already set up 10 big episode ideas for Futurama season 12. Another batch of 10 episodes is already in the works for release in 2024, and, hopefully, the show will be around long after that, too. The streaming TV landscape is perfect for Futurama, so things are looking more optimistic for the series’ future than they possibly ever have before. Between concepts the writers have mentioned, explicit set-ups, and obvious omissions on the show itself, there’s no shortage of ideas and potential storylines for the series to draw from going forward.
While heavily serialized shows are the norm these days, Matt Groening’s beloved cartoon really pioneered the idea of a comedy cartoon building a coherent world with ongoing story arcs. Much like fellow Fox series, The X-Files, it did this discreetly by mixing its lore episodes in among the usual monster-of-the-week fare. That means that Futurama has built up a great amount of potential when it comes to things audiences want to see in the future. These 10 big episode premises have all been set up in one way or another for the next season of the show and beyond.
9 Fry And Leela’s Backward-Time-Traveling Child
On the commentary for season 6, episode 16, “Law and Oracle,” showrunner, David X. Cohen, speaks about how it started as the concept of a time-traveling character who would appear, traveling backward in real-time. The character would have been revealed to be Fry and Leela’s future child, sent for reasons of grave importance. Despite the incredible premise, the writers couldn’t wrap their heads around making such a complex idea work, so they abandoned it. Cohen later spoke about it during a Reddit AMA:
8 Amy And Kif’s Children
Now that audiences have been properly introduced to Amy and Kif’s children, Newt, Mandy, and Axl, it’s time to start fleshing them out with storylines of their own. The titles for the next season of the show have already been released and there’s speculation that “Beauty and the Bug” could be a story about Newt or Mandy interacting with Amy’s pet, Betsy. The beloved buggalo was introduced in Futurama season 3, episode 10, “Where the Buggalo Roam.” Another possibility is “The Temp,” which some have suggested could be about Axl getting a temp job at Planet Express. Just as Dwight and Cubert have held stories of their own, episodes about Amy and Kif’s kids seem inevitable.
7 The Zapp And Kif Show
When asked about the possibility of a Futurama spinoff series, David X. Cohen revealed that he and some of the other writers had always wanted to produce an entire episode of Futurama as if it was The Zapp and Kif Show. The Planet Express crew would either only make small cameos or not appear at all, and the entire focus of the plot would be on Zapp and Kif’s antics aboard the Nimbus. It seems like elements of this idea were used for Zapp’s dream sequences in “In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela,” but there’s still plenty of potential for a full Zapp and Kif episode.
6 Anthology Of Interest III
Two of the best episodes of Futurama from the original run were season 2, episode 16, “Anthology of Interest I” and season 3, episode 18, “Anthology of Interest II,” where the crew asks the Professor’s What If Machine a series of questions and get to watch the resulting simulations. Despite not being part of the final Fox season, everyone assumed that “Anthology of Interest III” would follow as soon as the show’s Comedy Central revival started. Curiously, the revival instead opted to fully embrace the non-canon anthology format in brand-new ways, with every broadcast season since including a completely original anthology format. One example is season 6, episode 26, “Reincarnation,” which reimagines Futurama in a variety of different animation styles.
5 The Return Of The Brain Spawn
When Matt Groening and David X. Cohen originally conceived of the series, they saw the ongoing battle between the Brain Spawn and the Nibblonians as an epic story that would span the duration of the show. When they got the sense that cancelation was imminent, they decided to truncate their plans, and so the Brain Spawn were defeated once and for all in only their second appearance: season 4, episode 10, “The Why of Fry.” Upcoming episode title, “The Futurama Mystery Liberry,” references a line from their first appearance in Futurama season 3, episode 7, “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid,” so it’s likely to see them return, if only for a cameo.
4 A Disenchantment Crossover
Disenchantment established itself as being in the Futurama universe in season 1, episode 10: “Dreamland Falls,” where a brief glimpse appears of Fry, Bender, and the Professor traveling through time as they do in Futurama season 6, episode 7, “The Late Philip J. Fry.” Futurama returned this tip of the hat in season 8, episode 7, “I Know What You Did Next Xmas,” where a shot of Bean, Elfo, and Luci appears through the window as the Professor uses his time machine. With Disenchantment having now concluded, a crossover seems very possible, but given that Futurama only currently produces 10 episodes a year, it seems far more likely to be something The Simpsons does first.
3 The Return Of Marianne
In the previously penultimate episode of Futurama, Dr. Zoidberg finally finds happiness in the form of a girlfriend: Marianne. Unusually, the series opted to explicitly keep them together at the end of the episode. This gave Zoidberg a much-deserved happy ending following 139 episodes of misery. Now that the show is back, it’s yet to so much as mention Marianne, who was noticeably missing during “I Know What You Did Next Xmas.” Speculation that her absence is due to the availability of Marianne’s voice actor, Emilia Clarke, seems unlikely given Futurama‘s willingness to recast characters. Regardless, the stage is perfectly set for an emotional episode revealing what happened to her, where Zoidberg has to try to win her back.
2 The Sub-Mutants
Way back in Futurama season 2, episode 1, “I Second That Emotion,” the Planet Express crew helped the sewer mutants defeat El Chupanibre by flushing him down into the sub-sewer, below. The mutants speculate that a race of sub-mutants lives down there. It’s little more than a throwaway gag, but it’s one with huge implications that could easily sustain an entire episode of the show if it were explored. A mission to the Earth’s core could force the crew to explore the sub-sewer, and the sub-sub-sewer below it, and so on with new mutant societies all the way down.
1 When Nibbler Referred To Leela As “The Other”
In “The Why of Fry,” Fry travels back to 1999 and discovers that Nibbler caused him to be cryogenically frozen. Amazingly, it’s a detail that was set up years earlier in Futurama‘s pilot. Nibbler convinces future-Fry to not change the past by asking if he cares about anything in the future. When Fry mentions Leela, Nibbler responds with a contemplative, “She must be the other…” Given that Fry is essentially the “chosen one” when it comes to the Futurama war between Nibblonians and the Brain Spawn, the line has caused speculation about Leela having a hidden purpose pertinent to the safety of the entire universe. It’s a tease that’s yet to pay off in Futurama, and there’s no time like the present.
New episodes of Futurama are released Mondays on Hulu.
